Souvenir mug Airport Purchase from Riyadh Saudi Arabia (of all places!): 21,300 ppm Lead

For those new to the Lead Safe Mama website:

Tamara Rubin is a multiple-federal-award-winning independent advocate for childhood Lead poisoning prevention and consumer goods safety, and a documentary filmmaker. She is also a mother of Lead-poisoned children (two of her four sons were acutely Lead-poisoned in 2005).

• Tamara owns and runs Lead Safe Mama, LLC — a unique community collaborative woman-owned small business for childhood Lead poisoning prevention and consumer goods safety.
• Since July of 2022, the work of Lead Safe Mama, LLC has been responsible for five product recalls (FDA and CPSC).
• All test results reported on this website are science-based, accurate, and replicable.
• Please check out our press page to see some amazing coverage of our work so far this year!

One of my readers gave me this mug for my “Museum of Lead” collection because she had seen my article where I shared that “I even had readers in Saudi Arabia!” She thought those readers might be interested in knowing the test results of this unbranded souvenir mug (a gift a friend of hers bought her in the airport in Riyadh a year or two ago).

Update: One of my readers asked what I meant by “of all places!” in the title. What I meant by that is I would have never expected to be testing a souvenir from Saudi Arabia! (It’s so far away from Oregon, and so far I haven’t gotten anywhere near there in my travels. Also, because in fact, I came across this cup in Seattle!) I have tested things from Mexico, Japan, China, and all over the world, but in testing tens of thousands of items over the past 10 years this is the very first time I have tested something from Saudi Arabia!

When tested with an XRF instrument, this mug had the following readings (with a test completed for a minimum of at least 60-seconds):

Exterior painted decorative elements of the mug:

• Lead (Pb): 21,300 +/- 600 ppm 
• Chromium (Cr): 3,340 +/- 173 ppm
• Tin (Sn): 35 +/- 29 ppm
• Zinc (Zn): 18,100 +/- 600 ppm
• Copper (Cu): 447 +/- 65 ppm
• Iron (Fe): 3,094 +/- 275 ppm
• Titanium (Ti): 1,317 +/- 121 ppm
• Platinum (Pt): 372 +/- 144 ppm
• Cobalt (Co): 3,598 +/- 239 ppm
• Manganese (Mn): 2,705 +/- 343 ppm

White unpainted surface of mug (same as food surface/interior):

• Barium (Ba): 1,135 +/- 172 ppm
• Selenium (Se): 67 +/- 22 ppm
• Bromine (Br): 18 +/- 8 ppm
• Zinc (Zn): 16,600 +/- 200 ppm
• Iron (Fe): 279 +/- 30 ppm
• Bismuth (Bi): 148 +/- 16 ppm

If a metal is not listed in the test result set then it was not detected (with the XRF testing set in “Consumer Goods” mode).

As always, please let me know if you have any questions.

Thank you for reading and answering my own questions, too.

Tamara Rubin
#LeadSafeMama